ABC News chief legal analyst Dan Abrams argued on Friday that while President Donald Trump’s twitter attack on “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski was, among other things, “sexist” and “awful,” it wasn’t as shocking as the allegation that the president blackmailed Brzezinski and her co-host Joe Scarborough with a negative story about them in the National Enquirer.

“I mean, one thing is just awful,” Abrams said, on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” of Trump’s attack on Brzezinski. “But when you think about it from a macro-perspective, the idea that the president of the United States may be sending out his minions to threaten people about National Enquirer articles is astonishing,” Abrams added.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski responded to Trump’s Thursday morning tweets about them by, in part, claiming in a Washington Post op-ed that Trump threatened to push a negative story about them through the media.

“This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas,” Scarborough and Brzezinski wrote on Friday.

Trump said on Friday that Scarborough called him to stop the National Enquirer story from being published.

Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show